Targeted business outcomes
Unlike some of the more technical domains, the culture, change, and leadership domain tends to be more fluid in terms of prescriptive outcomes. This domain targets three primary outcomes:
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Alignment of critical organizational leaders and commitment of executive sponsorship
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Mobilization of required migration resources
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Envisioning the organization’s future state, specifically from the perspective of the teams and individuals impacted by the changes being implemented
To produce these targeted business outcomes, you first need to understand the current state of your organization, its culture, change history, leadership alignment, and organizational readiness to change, and then build the foundation to enable scale and speed down the road.
Understanding the current state
Every organization has an existing culture. Some of the predominant attitudes and behaviors that comprise the organizational culture are conducive to cloud readiness, some are neutral, and others are in conflict. Understanding the current state of the organization, the level of leadership alignment and executive commitment, the degree of buy-in to the broader cloud adoption strategy, the extent to which resource mobilization has or has not already occurred, and the organizational receptivity to change are all important aspects of determining where to prioritize cultural readiness efforts. Company culture is a powerful force, and the values, attitudes, behaviors, cultural norms, embedded rewards, deterrent mechanisms, and similar factors are likely to precede any cloud adoption strategy. Identifying and drawing awareness to potential areas of friction and using cultural levers for cloud adoption acceleration are key differentiators for companies that are able to create and maintain cloud adoption momentum, and these abilities set them apart from companies that stall.
There are a number of ways to formulate a picture of current state. AWS Professional
Services provides a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA)
process
In addition to following the MRA process, complete these activities to determine the current state of your enterprise:
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Collect background information from cross-functional leaders, key stakeholders from infrastructure, security, engineering, R&D, operations, HR, finance, and other teams, and engaged cloud partners.
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Attend relevant cloud transformation and cloud program kick-off meetings.
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Conduct deep-dive organizational readiness assessments, such as the impact assessment and culture assessment, outlined in the Summary of Activities section.
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Actively seek out diverse perspectives and historical knowledge, and understand and document the cultural values of the organization without assuming any awareness of upcoming changes across all impacted teams or leaders.
Building the foundation for the future
The people workstream for the AWS Prescriptive Guidance migration strategy is not intended to be a collection of activities that are performed as a stand-alone workstream. Instead, this work should be integrated into how the cloud migration or cloud program is implemented and delivered overall. Forming a tight partnership top down, bottom up, and across workstreams, as well as with any external consultants or partners is required. Because success is dependent on how well employees adopt the changes being rolled out, it’s beneficial to understand the current operational mode, the leadership approach, and how change is driven today, in order to define a path toward the future state. No two starting points are ever exactly the same. Earning trust is essential, and in order to do that, leaders must understand how the organization got to where it is today.
It’s useful to identify risks and opportunities as part of the discovery and assessment process. Risks and opportunities related to people will manifest in a number of ways, including misaligned leadership, lack of true executive sponsorship, organizational politics, a command-and-control culture, risk aversion, and strong resistance to change. Additionally, this work is difficult to complete unless you have access to the decision-makers in the organization.
To build the foundation to scale, you must define what success looks like organizationally, demonstrate results that can be refined, emulated, and scaled quickly, and use the correct applications, tools, and processes. Beginning with a team or set of teams in the organization that are primed and ready to take on a new way of operating, and learning from that team’s early experiences, can be an excellent springboard for creating positive organizational pressure to scale quickly and productively.
